Who

Motivation for Change

Pivotal Event

Assessment

Action

Adobe
(Frame-Maker)

• New management brought in to take company to next level.

• New VP / Eng wanted insurance before committing to schedule.

• Davenport Consulting assessed Engineering organization's ability to meet product delivery commitments.
• Company had excellent technical capabilities but dangerous weaknesses in estimating and QA.

• Led work breakdown and estimating effort to schedule the release.
• Introduced defect prediction metrics and Release Criteria.
• Project slipped by only 3 weeks over 9 months. (Even adding HTML during Beta!

• CTO wanted enhanced performance from Engineering, and had hired staff to inculcate SEI CMM(I) practices.

• An important potential customer was dissatisfied with the organization's ability to deliver product.

• Examined actual understanding and use of SEI CMM(I) key practices.
• Found too much time spent on slideware and complaining, too little on making basic improvements.

• New expertise brought in to own the Product Lifecyle.
• SCM and Release Engineering practices brought up to industry best practices and automated.
• Release dependability and quality soared, while build and release engineering productivity increased fourfold.

Aspirian

• CEO wanted trusted assessment of the company’s ability to deliver on schedule, unhappy with problems he sensed from finger-pointing.

• Board of Directors wanted due diligence prior to going for a new round of funding.

• Assessment of an offshore Engineering organization's ability to keep its product delivery commitments.
• Found that communication failures within senior management had the result of hiding important problems from CEO.

• Showed that the probable delivery date was at least 6 months later than the projected date.
• Rather than going for new funding, the Board shut the company down and sold its technology.

BMC Software

• Lack of synchronization between application development groups and the platform development group.
• Product delivery cycles were too long.
• New Engineering groups were being acquired.

• New VP of Engineering wanted consistent way to appraise projects at key common progress points.

• Determined engineering readiness for a common, iterative development methodology.
• Identified cultural and organizational impediments as well as critical success factors.

• Created and led cross-functional core team in the definition and roll-out of an Agile iterative methodology.
• Enabled assimilation of Marimba, Remedy, and Viadyne into a cohesive engineering team in under 6 months.
• Reduced delivery horizons from 18+ months to <12.

Ceridian  

• Repeated failures to meet date commitments to customers in delivering a major new product. (This was a huge project --  involving more than 100 people across the U.S.)

• Executive Management needed to decide whether to re-organize the new initiative or cancel it.

• Analysis to determine causes of inability to deliver new service offerings after repeated schedule slips.

• Established and led a cross-functional PMO in developing an integrated (and realistic) project plan.
• Created monthly Critical Metrics Reports to show bottlenecks and inefficiencies across the project, from Client Services set-up to P/R Technical Support.
• The re-organized initiative was launched and it succeeded.

EQE

• CTO unhappy with problems of late deliveries, internal finger pointing.
• CTO wanted an unbiased, expert assessment of the SW group’s ability to deliver reliable SW in the needed timeframe.

• New CTO hired to spin SW organization off into a separate company.

• Discovery of causes and analysis of software group's inability to meet schedule commitments.
• “Archeology” and evaluation of software architecture.

• Showed the software group how to successfully defend its estimates and how to report status so that progress became visible to Exec Management.
• Uncovered and documented the product architecture so that the geographically distributed development teams came to respect each other's work and to collaborate to deliver on time.

• Ford's extensive quality improvement programs had resulted in increased operational efficiencies across the board - except in IT.

• CIO for North American Operations demanded significant increase in IT productivity.
• The Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) had been unsuccessful in defining metrics that the CIO could relate to.

• Analyzed effectiveness of communications between CIO and SEPG.
• Analyzed causes of resistance to metrics in the IT groups.

• Defined metrics that IT staff and CIO agreed effectively translated IT work to IT productivity.
• Designed 18-month roll-out plan for the 5,000-strong IT organization, and monitored it to successful completion.
• CIO's productivity targets were achieved.

IBM

• Senior management needed to improve profit margins.

• New system put in place to better track profitability revealed the cost of troubled projects.

• Review of West Coast consulting projects.
• Defined early warning system for management by identifying:
  1. Hallmarks of successful projects.
  2. Pitfalls leading to troubled projects.
  3. Key indicators for executive management to monitor project.

• Changed how Services Management monitored and supported Project Managers' efforts.
• Project success rates and profits increased.

Inxight

• The company's development resources are widely dispersed geographically; multiple version control tools were used, and the SCm and build processes were poorly understood.

• CVS administrator was leaving the company.

• Examined existing CVS admin practices and Release Engineering practices.
• Analyzed configuration of the code base in the CVS repository.

• Introduced regular and reliable CVS practices, enabling Inxight to cheaply outsource CVS support.
• Re-organized the code base along component lines; identified and archived obsolete code.
• Made it easier and faster for developers across teams to understand their common apps and coordinate their work.

Integral Systems

• CEO was worried that the applications R&D group was not performing as well as it should.

• An important Sales opportunity required making product commitments.

• Analyzed both the applications group and the R&D group responsible for developing the platform that the applications were built on.
• Used project data and industry averages to show that the true cause of schedule slips was upstream – it was the quality of the platform delivered to the apps group.

• Apps group was able to define and uphhold platform acceptance criteria, so that overall schedule slips became visible earlier.

Liberate

• Company was missing its deadlines for delivering new products.
• Orders of existing products took far too long to ship, adversely impacting customer satisfaction, company revenues and brand value.

• Important orders were lost or delayed by several weeks.
• VP of Sales escalated issues to CEO.
• New COO wanted clear picture of complex interdependencies across the product range.

• Assessed product development process.
• Assessed release management and delivery processes.
• Modeled the order management value chain from sale through order entry, pick list, packaging, and shipping.

• Implemented a closed-loop order management process -- owned by Sales Ops -- that spanned Release Engineering, Legal and Finance to Shipping and customer Support which reduced order fulfillment to 2 days.
• Created a “universal” product development process, with defined cross-functional milestones, enabling true end-to-end project planning.
• Created a push-button build & release process.

QuestLink

• Desire to integrate new acquisition as quickly and cost effectively as possible.

• Board of Directors sensed potential problems with integration after acquiring another company.
• Requested due diligence assessment.

• Identified strengths and weaknesses of potentially competing projects and technologies in both companies (parent company and company it was acquiring) to recommend integration strategies.

• Convinced Board that there was a significant difference in the two companies’ technologies and skills, averting a loss (lay-off) of crucial company skills.

• Company was expanding its Professional Services organization to support Enterprise sales.

• Loss of several important Enterprise customers.

• Surveyed Professional Services managers across the country to analyze project failures.
• Identified inadequate software skills staffing as well as inadequate command of project management skills.

• Developed a prototype Project Management Bootcamp for the Education division.

• SP was negotiating to outsource its IT to IBM.

• SP and IBM needed to agree metrics to use in monitoring IT effectiveness under the outsourcing agreement.

• Analyzed SP's business objectives for outsourcing.
• Assessed the IT organization's ability to collect and analyze metrics data.

• Defined a hierarchy of measures that translated IT effort into achievable business performance indicators to meet contractual requirements.
• Worked with functional managers to define their metrics collection, analyis and reporting processes.

• This start-up hosts standard Linux stacks for its customers.

• CEO desired to assure scalability of build & test functions prior to expanding.

• Mini-audit of the build and test environment at Spike Source.

• No action needed. The Spike Source build and test environment proves to be among the very best we have ever seen.

SSA

• New CIO wanted insurance before committing to business viability of proposed spin-off.

• Plan to spin off IT as a software company.

• Assessment of Engineering organization's ability to deliver credible software products.

• Showed that developing the necessary skills and technologies to transition to an ISV would be too costly to support the business plan.

U. S. Dept of Commerce

• The Department of Commerce Director who chaired Working Level Group knew he lacked technical expertise and wanted an expert in the field.

• U.S. and Japan entered into Joint Science and Technology agreement.

• Evaluated strengths and weaknesses in U.S. and Japanese technical capabilities to support the Joint Agreement on Science and Technology.

• Identified Japanese technology areas of particular interest to the U.S., as well as U.S. technology areas to protect.

State of California Gov’t Health / Human Svcs.

• Quality issues with food stamp program.

• Federal audit with possibility of large penalties.

• Review of the processes used to maintain the food stamp application.
• Discovered insufficient rigor in testing and release management.

• Introduced full life cycle testing.
• Initiated a rigorous release management process.
• Over time, realised a significant reduction in food stamp defects -- from 14% to 2.5%.

Entertainment Conglomerate

• Business was not happy with the quality of services from IT.

• New VP of apps was appalled by lack of discipline, process and visibility into projects.

• Performed reviews of 6 key projects.
• Assessed basic “blocking and tackling” processes –Project Mgmt (PM), Quality Assurance (QA) and Service Request Mgmt (SR).

• In collaboration with client defined and implemented PM, QA and SR processes.

Property and Casualty Insurance

• Key project was behind schedule and over budget.

• CIO was concerned that the troubled project would not meet commitments being made to the business.

• Performed in-depth project review.

• Instituted formal project management processes.
• Established Project Steering Committee with business participation.
• Replaced project manager.

Health Insurance

• Business desired to obtain more value from IT.

• CIO was under considerable pressure to deliver value to the business.

• Performed comprehensive review of methods, processes and organization.
• Assessed the organization using the SEI CMM model.

• Established new governance process to identify and focus on projects that deliver most value to organization.
• Began a transformation effort to attain higher levels of SEI CMM maturity.